 I can give you a little thumbs up every time. Yes. Okay. All right. My name's Vid. I'm from the University of Edinburgh. Thanks for coming to this talk. When I was five in school, my maths teacher used to always say, Mathematicians are lazy. And I thought, that's kind of weird. Why? Like, you're saying that as if it's a good thing? I realized over time that doing things the lazy way is often a wise approach, which is don't have that much time. So save time where you can, right? Now we're at the OER 23 conference. So I don't really need to be convincing anybody why, like we might want to open up stuff. Once you're at that stage, though, and this is particularly relevant perhaps for learning technologists, for educators, or for anyone supporting education, like, what do you do now? How do you actually open up materials at the University of Edinburgh? We use Blackboard Learn BLE, and this year, or over the last year and this year, we're transitioning between versions of this BLE. We have been working with Blackboard Learn Original since 2010, for a certain year. And it is now deprecated. Blackboard have released a new version of Learnful Ultra. And while this might seem like a technical detail, it has an impact on openness as well. The new version has a better user interface and has better mobile support, better accessibility features, lots of good reasons to move. However, one thing that's changed is they've removed the guest access we've got. And Blackboard Learn Original, it could tick a box, of course, settings, but anybody could access it without going in. That is no longer possible in Blackboard Learn Ultra. And at least the school of informatics is quite concerned about this, since we've had a culture of making our courses available openly before. And there's many, many reasons why we might want to do so, not just for the public, but also for our own students. Think about prospective students who might want to decide whether they want to take a course or not. They need to see their course materials. Think about students on different courses that have to, like, they might not have time to be enrolled yet, even though they know what they want to do. Again, they would need access to a course. And also, course organizers between different courses might find it easier to share materials without having to go emailing back and forth if they can see what they have on the bottom. So this is a concerning thing. We wanted to see with this team that I had shared up front, how do other institutions share materials with the public so that I can be the least person? What is the least effort approach that we can take our existing materials from Blackboard Learn and make them available for the public? So let's take a look at how do we go about this. I hired a team of free research assistants, and we basically built a massive spreadsheet like this, right? Give a project to informaticians, they'll build you a big spreadsheet. Of course. Don't worry. If you're interested, I can share the spreadsheet. If you're not, I'm going to just summarize the details. Basically, we put together links to as many different sites that we're sharing materials publicly, and that includes open sharing and not open sharing. And taking a look at what kind of site is it? Whose materials are they? Who are they for? And also how difficult might it be to recreate something like this? So this was a very quick judgment. Just seeing what is their site made with? For example, edX was top of the list created with their open edX framework. So that was one option. And lots of others that come up, Drupal, Hugo, you see, Next.js. So lots of this comes down to the actual web frameworks that they use to make their site. How do we make a decision of what would be the easiest way to use for our own courses? Well, we put together everything grouping by the frameworks and the tools that websites use. We got over 40 tools from looking at over 100 examples within our university and also outside of it. What now? How do we decide? And for the options, that is a lot to try. I can't give them all a go. I can't even analyze them properly. So you know what's happening? We both another spreadsheet. This time we're looking at some surface level criteria. So here I've got the top of this spreadsheet where I have some frameworks like Hugo, building a website just without any framework with HTML, the language of the web, having a GitHub repository using JET code and examples of links that use these frameworks. Some notes about what it means. But most importantly, we had some columns where we considered very surface level criteria. At a glance, how does it do for some automated benchmarks which consider accessibility, performance, search engine optimization? So how easy is it to find using a search engine? Accessibility. Is there tracking and user management? It was really important for our university to be able to see, is this website being used? There should be some kind of tracking, say, of user downloads of materials. And it should be possible for users to log in because we wanted to allow users to contribute content, yet moderate. Some other criteria that we looked at, do we have an API? And what kind of content do they support? We have a variety of things like in our existing materials. We want to have embedded PDFs. We want to have videos, images, audio. We want to have code highlighting. So how difficult would it be to support all of these? Flexibility. How varied can this be? How much can people tailor something to their own preferences? And then finally, we had four people evaluating the learning curve. How much effort would it be in our opinions to create a site using this? And we had four people do this independently because I think it is highly subjective. So hopefully averaging out over multiple opinions, we get something closer to objective. But that's a bit how we do that. So putting everything together into one graph, we map basically on two axes, all of the options that we found. One is flexibility, which we really rate at just red, yellow or green. Here I indicated as three rows. So these are basically not much flexibility. Things are rigid in the way that they are set. Here you have some and here you have quite a lot and learning curve score. That is an average of how much did we think that it would be difficult or easy to use this. The higher we are, the more to the right, the easier it would be to learn to use this tool. And I'm thinking from the perspective of users who are using the site, not necessarily from the perspective of the people setting it up. So what I expected to see was kind of something like a straight line that the more flexibility you have, the harder it is to use, the less flexibility, the easier to use, right, the fewer buttons. That's not what we ended up with. And I was quite surprised. We had a wide range of the kind of things that were all over the place. The only things that didn't really exist were things that are really easy to use and really flexible. That's what we were looking for. But hey, we're still looking for things kind of in the top right quadrant. And among these options, we have a few that you'll probably recognize like WordPress and Moodle show up as high flexibility and kind of easy to learn. Then there's Silverstripe, who's using a GitHub repository. There's Jack Hill and Umla and a few other options. Now, we're evaluating from the perspective of how well or how flexible would this be for our school of informatics. I wouldn't expect that you could apply this to your organization or institution that you would evaluate it the same way. But hopefully, just knowing what options are out there and the links is a helpful starting point for evaluating them on your own criteria. So this helped us to narrow down to less than 10 candidates from over 40 that we had. But now what? Like, that's still quite a lot and we still have to choose just one or two that we can try. So what do we do? Well, now we did detail the valuation of the top few candidates. And this is just a screenshot from the Word document that we put together that shows an evaluation of Canvas. We put together links to all the example sites we found using Canvas, some screenshots of what it looks like, and then different criteria, how it's content formatted, what skills would users require to use it. I'm not going to go through all of them. But for all of the criteria, we're basically also used the same color coding. Green is good. Yellow is eh. And red is what helped for this. I see some red flags, so I have to be careful. So we did this for seven different frameworks. And then each of the four people working on this had their own ranking, which again is kind of subjective of what should we try and in what order. So we had the variety and I just summed them together to cancel out the differences in opinions. So we ended up with our final recommendation report, which says, let's try Moodle, open a dex, Canvas and media with keepers. What happens next after this? So we're going to be trying a prototype for a single informatics course this year. And evaluating it with focus groups of students to see what do they think. Okay. All this time we've been considering the lazy approaches from how difficult would this be to set up and how difficult is it for lecturers to put on content. And now how usable is the end result for students and target audience and also a survey with informatics staff about how they find their prototypes. So we'll be doing this with at least one framework, hopefully two, three, maybe four at first time. We'll see. Always aim for the best and let's see what happens. This is still research in progress. So you can expect to see results from the prototype implementation and student feedback at the Edinburgh Learning and Teaching Conference. I hope to see at least some of you there. We'll be taking place at the end of June. But yeah, whatever happens, that's going to be going into school-wide deployment by September when our deadline is due to an ultra. That's all I had to share for today. Any questions? Thank you so much. I've now seen that 39 has been removed from the culture. I'm happy to control the two slides. This one. I'm going to ask you. I don't know if we can get it back in again. Okay. Yeah, just on the... Okay. It's going to be short. Is it on the main screen? Yeah. Hi. My name is Lucy Deety and I don't come from very far away, but 60 miles northwest up the road at a bicycle locker in the Ellicombe. And before I start today's poster presentation, I just wanted you guys to think about two questions and I'm looking for some help. So hopefully you might be able to help me. But I wanted to ask how do we define open educational practices within the definitions of public impact? And the second question, does that actually matter? So you can either speak to me here now or afterwards, but if you're interested in me connecting any stage ID tweet, I've got a Gaelic spelling with my first name, Lucy Deety. That's only because I had an error with my previous user title, so I had to change it. And I also have a website, a blog called researchlog.scot. So you can have a look at some of the things I've put there. And my email address is obscured, but I'm a student at the University of West of Scotland. So my email address is Lucy.beety.us.ac.uk. Right, OK. Oh, I see. OK, Grant. So I'm a PhD student at the School of Education and Social Sciences at EWS, although I work in Moabee out of the Highlands. And in my previous background, I've kind of done an academia wee bit back to front. I did go to, I was an undergraduate as an agricultural scientist. And when I was 21, I became a farmer through circumstances beyond my control and my parents died. And I had to come home and run a farm in the Northwest Islands of Scotland. And then circumstances changed me again because I had a big hole in my stomach. So I couldn't work carrying a lot of sheep anymore, so I had to use my brain instead of my body. And I realized I could, and I got a few opportunities to do some teaching in agriculture. And then I was working for a community education project for the Crofting Federation, as well as a little bit of work for the EHI and concurrence that I started doing a master in education. And Keith, who sat there, was my supervisor when I put my thesis in and I did that part-time. I very much enjoyed that bug. So in 2020, I decided to apply for a PhD, and that's how I ended up where I am today. So I'm going to present the poster on some of the discussions that have arisen out of my PhD. I'm in my final stages writing up and I've looked at how academics in Scotland link their teaching, research and public engagement. And the sort of links between teaching and research has been long established since the days of Alexander von, sorry, Wilhelm von Humboldt, wrong brother. And he made the sort of distinction in 1810 when he founded the University of Berlin, that teaching and research should always be in unity and so on. When I was starting to look at how STEM lecturers found this in Scotland, I found that there was another annexus that was described in some academic literature that I encountered through a paper published by a list of Stevenson and Jan MacArthur in 2015. There's a wee reference down there and I'm happy to share this slide with you if you want to check that out. But they looked at what they call the triple nexus, so how research, teaching and public engagement links. And so I interviewed nine scientists working in Scottish universities who actively teach undergraduate cohorts and asked them to some of their opinions and perceptions on how this might work in different situations. So I did a couple of phases of interviews and the diagram that I've got here sort of shows you roughly how they situated. And I gathered that data through analysing, interviews by hand or seizing and vivo and looking at word clouds and how people actually sort of locate themselves. So some people were very much on the outer edges. For example, he got this one solitary person who was actually an engineer who'd kind of moved away from research and kind of really got into a public engagement role at an ancient university in Scotland. And then some folks here who definitely saw the links between teaching and research, but they had seen as you mentioned the word public engagement, they just wanted to run away and they said things like, I'm too old, I can't get involved with that, I can't be bothered, I don't go to science festivals. Other folks who were kind of curious, maybe stepping towards a wee bit that some had stepped back because they felt that they had too many demands made upon them by the university as obligations to engage with the public and they felt it was a tick box exercise and they felt quite solid by that because often what happens is that the magic word public engagement suddenly releases a load of funding and their thoughts were, well, why not, we are engaging with the public with students every day. I'm talking to people in the pub I meet at night, you know, what I do and that is public engagement. So there's quite a nuance conceptions about what public engagement is and how that's viewed within a higher education institution. I'll come back to the two folks who are in the middle and there are some people, another person lurking up there who kind of very much dealt with computer science and user experience. So they were about engaging with the public and in Scotland there was certainly been a drive within the health industry to look at user experience and how that drives your search. So I'm just sharing a few findings here on this post-it note. It's written quite small but you're welcome to come and have a look at the poster. I found that computer scientists are using open source coding in Python and are with their own students and they're using students' knowledge as well as co-creators to kind of interact with that and we had the talk earlier on from Geoffrey in the auditorium and he was going on about how great Python is and what an open community is and it's a great community of practice. And I said to the community scientists, have you ever actually written that as being part of your impact case study? Because I'd looked at research that had looked at the research excellence framework in the UK from 2014 and a paper that was delivered from the National Centre for Public Engagement in Bristol in 2017 showed that actually computer scientists, chemistry lecturers, physicists and so on all those within what they find a STEM panel being distance are the least likely to submit impact case studies. So I wanted to find out why that was and when I spoke to this computer scientist I said, okay so all the work you have been doing has got public impact, do you submit that in your case study? And he said no because I actually don't know how that works and I don't know how you'd actually quantify that. So that's a question I had for you guys today, what's your experience like? Could that become a legitimate submission? Chemistry lecturers as well I spoke to them and they used OERs to mimic lab conditions and run tests in COVID-19. This is particularly an example of liquid gas chromatography which was used at two different institutions and one of the lecturers I spoke to said well we found a few problems with it, a few edits amongst the class and then we put that back out into the open source community. So again it's maybe not as bright lights as going to a science festival, you're still engaging with the public. What I did find was that when I was speaking to these folks during the period of the lockdowns I spoke to people over, well first of all I think we were very locked down when I first spoke to them, second time we'd opened up more but people who were in distributed campuses, much like UHI or somewhere, they've been working with open educational resources and have open educational practices embedded already and from the get-go the day that the lockdown was kind of announced it wasn't really a massive problem and that kind of concept of pivot pedagogy wasn't a new idea for them because they could ease in pivot from one situation to the other. Other people that I spoke to in different campuses found it quite difficult and then there were some people I interviewed and said well thank goodness we're going back to normal now, we can revert back to our normal ways of practice. So I thought well open educational practices are really great for helping to increase resilience amongst your learners, your learning community and also accessibility and I think about from my own situation obviously living somewhere very remote and rural like the Highlands and you know at one point when I was going through my master's education I was a mother of three still in school living on a farm so I wasn't going to get very many places very quickly so things like open education really helped and I've certainly seen that through the agricultural community. So I found a few differences between people's attitudes to it, between post-92 institutions and pre-92 institutions with kind of more ancient universities and so on, they tended to have open educational resources that were invested by what they call public engagement professionals, PEPs, there's a sort of acronym for that role. So I spoke about the two folks that were in the middle, well they were actually early career researchers and they were based at what I would describe as an ancient university in Scotland so somewhere like St Andrews or Edinburgh or Glasgow and they were very much located within the middle of this nexus and that was their kind of conceptualisation or their culture change that they experienced through postgraduate education and actually getting some teaching and learning experience and working on the PGCAT programs they could fully recognise that this sort of triple aspect of work was really really important to what they did and so that sort of embedded the value of public engagement and they could see a role for open education within that. So I guess one of my questions to you guys is well if you know the research excellence framework in the UK how can we as educators actually sort of promote open educational practices but not to kind of incentivise it like a league table but just to say well if you're embedding open educational practice and what you do every day that is public impact and it's not necessarily having to go out and make a big show and perhaps do a talk or something where lecturers sometimes feel obliged and they get sort of a bit of on your e as I'd say like sort of a bit of boredom like oh gosh you know we've got to go and do another bit of engagement if it's something that you do naturally every day in your work then it does become impact. So I've put two comments up here as well from lecturers that had about open access journals so Theta A was the first person I interviewed and they said certainly from the research side of things is open access journals are being pushed a lot and we're submitting to them and therefore the universities need to embrace it and that kind of suggested to me that their academic institution hadn't really sort of embraced that idea of open access journals and I guess again that gets down to money and payments and funding and if you have to go back and say well we need 600 pounds to make us open access and then there's maybe a struggle to actually get that funding to do that why is that you know people should be committing to that. One another thing is about the conceptualization of open access journals this delta I was a chemistry academic I spoke to and they said having open access journals is great but you write an open access article for an academic you don't write that for a policymaker or for a member of the public and that's where your impact comes from so I thought that was quite interesting because in that sentence they were kind of describing a state of other ring sort of suggesting you know that a member of the public might not go and look at an open access journal and I have to say that my experience and some of the people who I interviewed their experience was that people who are not maybe connected to academia or even policymaking might be searching through the net and come across an open access journal and they'll be able to read some academic literature and you know that might have impact further on their life it might make them decide to go and you know change a career from being a farmer to a PhD student you never know so I think we kind of need to look at how people conceptualize that and of course there are different levels of impact that can be derived from your knowledge creation so I guess I've asked if I could get a bit of help and feedback from you guys and my parents being here today is to sort of share my post which you're welcome to come and have a more detailed look at get some feedback get some ideas I'm writing a discussion chapter just now if anyone wants to collaborate with me as well I'm very open to that because I'm a remote student so you have to make as many connections as you can and I just wanted to ask questions again you know how would we as educators define open educational practices within the definition of public impact and I don't know if you ever saw the quiz show where they used to have the lying points mean prizes so unfortunately it seemed to be the way that you know funding works points mean prizes so how do we translate that into a practical solution some of the things I've looked at obviously created common license things like that you know that figure I put on figure share which is an open access place to share your figures but you know just kind of knowing that making that an everyday practice in your life can then make your work more open so yeah I guess I'm just going to finish up now and yeah offer out to any of you guys for any feedback or questions that might have a couple of suggestions I mean one is I mean you mentioned it yourself at the end they are about critical most licenses and certainly one of the things that we kind of worked very hard with at the University of Edinburgh is encouraging use of critical common licenses because if you want to ensure that our resource is genuinely open it has to have that open license otherwise it's just a thing on the net and won't know how they can use it once you go down the open access research publishing route then the research papers should be open license but I think you know we all engage in a lot of practice but to really make that open it does need to be shared under open license and also in terms of I was really interested in what you were saying about the accessibility of open access journals and you know how accessible are they to the public and I think you know it's great that they're there but one of the things that we also encourage is using other routes to communicate the outputs of academic research for example academic blogging because that can work in harmony with sort of publishing open access journal papers but it can bring that research to a whole new audience so we actually have an academic blogging service in the University and I run a course for staff of postgraduate research students on how they can use professional blogging to promote their professional practice in their research careers and I've got open resources to share with you. Okay, thank you. To what extent it's a question as much as anything else but following on from creative comments, to what extent do you think that copyright open access materials impinges on public engagement with open educational materials and there's a lot of open access journals created from materials but copyright is applied to variety of materials pre-creative comments coming along so does that impinge do you think on the open education experience and how it works with public engagement? It probably can I mean if you think about even pictures you know if you're making my software.qc my kids were at 2.91 and they looked to I say well actually check what it's got created, comments, licensing, tick the books and then that suddenly restricts everything that they can actually put up on there so for other situations I suppose it's about awareness of where copyright comes and then perhaps it's only if someone makes a mistake or an error or doesn't realise about copyright that it comes back to them yes when you're involved in the academic world you have knowledge about copyright and how it impinges but yeah yes please that was great, thank you. This kind of relates to Laun's points as well I think what your research has shown is a real tension between publishing openly and writing openly and I think if we're kind of looking at knowledge, public knowledge I think within institutions we have to think really carefully about how that's communicated and then blogging is one way obviously but we've got a kind of bigger problem I think you mentioned the REF and as a national exercise the REF values and rates work on it's sort of scientific rigor whether that's in the sciences or in the social sciences doesn't necessarily, doesn't rate work at all on the extent to which the work produced can be public knowledge and it's really public knowledge so I think there's something that probably has to be addressed there as well and if we're going to move forward in this particular area it's good to know Yes just to add on Laun's point there I think e-portfolios also support academic blogging and it's a bit more on the institutionally and create a site for us at least from the DCU so it doesn't say university yet so just e-portfolios in general will be that can work if you don't know I'm also thinking kind of anecdotally of the recent REF results in the School of Informatics we've had this presentation day of all these five-star and four-star impact REF impact cases from my point of view I noticed the pattern between the most successful stories where it's like we came up with this new kind of technology it was incorporated into products of this really large company which has this many consumers and therefore we have impact on this many people in the world so like this kind of indirect impact which is very easily quantifiable by the user base of an organization here if you share open code on a forum you can't really say that all the users of that forum are now users of what you shared whereas with a company that makes products kind of it's more acceptable to say that all the users of this company are now influenced by the technology the company adopts so maybe going via open companies is a solution open companies that adopt open practices so kind of mutual understanding between the end user and the person that puts it out another really good way to share outputs for public engagement is to integrate them with the Wikimedia projects I was actually listening to your podcast it's tricky when it comes to original research because you can post your own original research on Wikimedia you shouldn't even be posting primary sources on Wikimedia, Wikimedia is fueled by secondary sources that will actually critique and comment the original research but we've had a lot of success with students writing Wikimedia entries about scientific topics which and their entries will synthesize the available research and to create new Wikimedia entries and we've had some really great examples of that particularly our sort of biological scientists, we have one student created an article on a very common form of barbarian cancer that had no Wikimedia article and she wrote the article for it and it said 150,000 views and that was on the undergraduate assignments and most undergraduate assignments dispute on the black hole, that's still there on Wikimedia so there are definitely ways that you can use Wikimedia, Wikidata, Wikicommons for public engagement you just have to be careful that you don't contravene the sort of neutral point of view and the conflict of interest and all these checks and balances they have in place but Wikimedia UK can help you with that, so yeah if you contact them there is a project coordinator for Scotland called Sarah Thomas who works for Wikimedia UK and she can provide advice and that's good stuff. Thank you. Any other questions or comments? Just sorry, one comment about what your research participants said about your writing for an audience of academics and I can understand that especially in STEM if they're writing quite technical stuff with jargon and stuff they don't expect the audience to read it but are they part of disciplinary networks including people in countries who don't have access to these people or journals? I think living in these well resolved environments we sometimes tend to forget there are thousands of people who are following the science but they can't access all this stuff and maybe it's a case of building more explicit partnerships across communities so that people can actually see me reading my stuff. I think that's been evident actually in agriculture because OELs and agriculture really first came out with Africa and other nations and then you know that context moved more into European OELs. I think there's something to learn there from that aspect of science. Thank you.